Inspired by LifeHacker’s older post about making your own whiteboard for cheap, I bought a 4’x8′ sheet of dry erase board from Home Depot for $13. I had them cut it down into 2 3’x4′ sections and one 2’x4′ section on account of I have a Honda Fit and that’s just not gonna hold a 4’x8′ section of anything.

I had some spare aluminum foil tape left over from a previous project (fixing 10 individual water leaks in my 2007 Honda Fit). I lined the 4 edges of each board with the foil tape, putting roughly half of the foil tape on the front and then wrapping the rest around to the back of the board. This helps to provide a little bit of rigidity and more importantly covers up any edges and imperfections from when the board was cut. If you want more rigidity, just put another layer of the aluminum foil tape on.

Then I used some Command medium picture hanging strips (I LOVE these things!) and mounted my new whiteboards on the wall.

I’m pretty happy with these!

And I have enough whiteboard for another one downstairs in the family room.

tl;dr: 1) Nice job on the Notifications dropdown, Facebook devs! 2) I still really miss RSS feeds and Jabber message integration!! 3) You should hire me! I have some ideas on how to make this better! =;P

I’ve just never really used Facebook consistently before. My biggest complaint has always been that unlike Twitter or RSS feeds or e-mail, I did not see any way to stay caught up. To leave off wherever you are, come back to it later and your place in the list of events has not moved. With Twitter/RSS/e-mail/other things, you can do this. Pick up again wherever you left off and keep working your way through whatever it is, and most importantly, you know that you have not missed anything during any of this. Sure, you might be behind in your progress for a while, and until you’re caught up, you may have delayed reactions to things. But I much prefer this linear information navigation. Or at least I prefer having this type of knowledge consumption and data navigation be even possible. Knowing that I’m not missing out on anything is important to me.

Facebook has never made this easy for me. Facebook used to have RSS feeds that I would use and be able to catch up on unread events, etc., and know that I’m not missing anything along the way. That functionality was removed a long time ago.

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that I just discovered that I can do an approximation of what I’m looking for by using the Notifications dropdown in the Facebook toolbar at the top of my screen. It’s not perfect, but now that I’ve found it, it looks like it’s my best alternative to just refreshing Facebook and looking at the list of groups and friends I’m most interested in. Or scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And there’s a “see all” link to take you to a new page to navigate your notifications. Nice.

I think it would be a nice addition to Facebook to add functionality onto the /notifications page. I wouldn’t necessarily force it to be tied to settings or persistent changes, but there are times that I’d like to choose what data I’m seeing on this Notifications list differently than others. For example, right now I’m most interested in staying caught up with all of my VMware family and friends. If I could get a list of “here’s all the people that I’m going to show you in the list below” and check/uncheck them individually or assign groups or whatever, that would be very helpful. Similarly, sometimes I’m interested in seeing who has liked one of my posts or comments. Right now, the information flood is too much and I’d like to filter that noise out.

So… nicely done on the Notifications dropdown, whomever at Facebook designed that.

And I still miss RSS feeds and Jabber integration. =:(

And now that I’ve been laid off along with the rest of my Workstation and Fusion friends, I’m looking for interesting work in areas that I’ve not done before. So clearly, Facebook should hire me because then I could help implement the ideas I posited above. =;)

I posted this on my Amazon Reviews page too, but I figured it was worth a blog post as well.


I cannot emphasize how much I love the Neato Botvac 80! It’s still early days and we’ve only had it for a month or so, but the Botvac 80 is absolutely perfect for our family.

We have a large house. It’s around 1100 square feet per level and we have 3 levels. We’ve had a Neato XV-11 for 3 years now and it has some very major design flaws. The belt and gear assembly underneath, where the brush is, is exposed and not protected. This means that the belt and gear are constantly getting clogged with hair. The only way to clean this area is to get a very long sharp pointy thing (I use an exacto knife) and a very long pointy set of tweezers. And then you spend, I kid you not, at least 15 minutes each time the XV-11 gets clogged and tells you “my brush is stuck”, cleaning it out. I used the XV-11 to clean our upstairs carpet and the first time through, I had to clean its belt and gear area 6 times before it finally got through. This is just irritating beyond belief. Here’s a YouTube video that shows what I’m talking about:

The display on our XV-11 finally completely died and all we have now is a bright white square that tells us nothing when there’s problems. So it was time to look for a new robot vacuum. I looked at the Roomba line and was hoping that they’d fixed the major design flaw that drove me to buy a Neato originally: Roombas run out of battery and go back to their charging station… and call it a day. They don’t go back out and finish the job. You either have to start them manually again or wait for their next scheduled time to run. And they’re going to start from the very beginning again, either way, so they’re probably going to run out of battery before they finish the job again! Neatos, on the other hand, will return to their charging station, charge back up again, and go back out to right where they left off and finish the job. Like it should be!

Even the latest Roomba models have not fixed this yet.

Also, Roombas use little lighthouse stations that you have to buy and stick D batteries in to block off areas for the vacuum. Neatos, on the other hand, use a simple magnetic strip that you can put anywhere, even under carpet, to block off areas for it not to cross over. And since it’s a simple magnetic strip, you can make your own magnetic strips and not have to buy them from Neato. We do this often, either temporarily or seasonally (to keep it from going under the Christmas tree, etc.).

So I looked at the Neato Botvacs and tried to see if they’d addressed the gear/belt design flaw. I couldn’t find any reviews that said they did. I also found a lot of people making negative reviews, saying that the Botvac is just a rebranding of the XV line and not worth the money. BOY WERE THEY WRONG!

The Botvac 80 has completely addressed the gear/belt design flaw. This area is completely enclosed now and cannot possibly get clogged with hair. They’ve also improved the brush design, the size and quality of the dust bin, the HEPA filter, the interface, button layout, the charging station, used ball bearings to help the brush spin more freely, and even the noise level is MUCH better (quieter) than the XV-11 that we have. They also added a side brush, like the one the Roomba has, to make sure the robot can get the entire surface of the floor, up to the edge of the walls, and even under the edges of furniture. Oh, and they made it shorter, so it fits under more furniture now and cleans better.

I hate spending money on things that do simple jobs. Especially large amounts of money ($400 or so) for something as “simple” as sweeping/vacuuming. But I can tell you that I am 100% satisfied with the Neato Botvac 80. I will be buying at least one more for the upstairs and basement. It is SO worth the money spent.

Neato still seems to be the underdog in the Vacuum Robot wars. Roomba has made some really nice products and has a lot of brand recognition. But I wholeheartedly recommend the Neato Botvac, especially if you’re coming from an older Neato XV model like we were. It will blow you away with how good it is. Disclaimer: I’ve had absolutely zero contact from Neato, spent $400+ of my own monies, and this is not a paid review in any way. That being said, I’d LOVE to test any of Neato’s products in the future,. =:D

Well done, Neato. I’ve fallen in love with your robot… again.

I haven’t blogged much lately. I’m sure this isn’t that big of a deal to anyone but me, based on the complete lack of questions like “hey, you haven’t blogged much lately, is everything okay”, etc. It’s also obvious to me that my friends, who themselves used to be avid bloggers, now don’t really do all that much with their blogs anymore either. 

But it’s been bothering me for a while.

I blame Twitter and Facebook, personally. It used to be that the only way we had to be social, with ideas and feedback and such, were blogs. And with Twitter and Facebook, it’s so easy to satisfy 90% of my desire to communicate with and get feedback from my friends, that I just rarely think about blogging much anymore.

I blame awesome technology like my iPad too. It used to be that I’d nearly always have a laptop on my lap, and it was much easier to just open a new tab and blog something. I was the loudest of scoffers when the iPad first came out. I thought that this was just one new technology that was a clear attempt at taking more money out of my wallet and that there’s no way it would actually work for me. After all, I’m a software developer!! I eat and breathe and live code! I live in the Matrix!!! So why would I ever want to get a device like a tablet that I couldn’t even compile code on?!?

That didn’t last long, of course. I got an iPad because it was shiny and I thought it would be neat to have as a cool toy, and I wanted to have one like my friends. But I honestly didn’t think it’d be the device that I used most whilst not at work.

Boy was I wrong.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but I now use my iPad probably at least 99% of the time when I’m not at work. I won’t even go into the discussion about how this has led me to not hacking on Open Source projects hardly at all anymore. That’s just too depressing. But I will say that having my iPad be my 99% device outside of work means that it’s just not as easy to blog anymore.

But I think I want to change this. I managed to resurrect my Think Outside Stowaway folding bluetooth keyboard once again (COME ON, JORNO KEYBOARD!!!!). And I’ve discovered the free Posts application for the iPad, which is what I’m using right now. And this feels doable.

So here I sit, in the local Starbucks lobby, about to enjoy a Pumpkin Spice Egg Nog Latte, blogging once again. And it feels good.

I still need to figure out how to tie my blog into the social networks better. I’d love any suggestions and help with that. I think I’m using the Social plugin for my WordPress blog right now. Maybe there’s something better?

Anyway, here’s to blogging in the New Year. And here’s wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas. =:)

This is more of a rant than anything else. I despise the “threaten to cancel your phone account to get good customer service” approach to dealing with companies, so I’ve not tried it before. And this was no idle threat today… I was fully prepared to cancel a phone line to get what I needed. So please don’t read this as “hey, this trick worked for me and you should try it too,” because it’s definitely not. I was prepared to cancel 1 phone line to get what I needed, but Sprint surprised me by doing what I’d been asking them to do for the last month to keep me from canceling. And I’m hesitant to even post this because I am honestly thankful that I’m able to do what I need to do for my family without having to cancel any phone lines and I don’t want people to read this as a possible strategy or a way to cheat the system. But I’m more than just a little bit irritated that I had to actually call to cancel a phone line to get the good customer service I felt I deserved.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

We have 6 smart phones on my Sprint mobile phone account. Prior to today and with absolute certainty for the last month, I was told that Sprint is utterly and physically and technically unable to add more than 5 phone lines to a shared family plan, and that if you add more lines, you have to add another plan. This meant that I had 5 phone lines on Sprint’s “1500 minutes, shared everything” plan for ~ $250 per month and then I had to buy another plan to service the 6th phone line. So instead of spending $250 for 5 lines and adding the 6th line on for the usual $19.99 per month, Sprint was making me pay $70 per month for the 6th phone line because it required an additional plan. Mind you, we use maybe only 500 shared minutes on our main “1500 minutes, shared everything” plan, so we’re theoretically paying for a lot of minutes that just go to waste every month. But anyway…

I have tried at least 5 times in the last month to get Sprint to figure out some way to let me include the 6th phone line as part of our 5-line shared everything plan. I spent 4 hours in the Verizon and AT&T stores, talking with their sales people and comparing how much they’d charge for the same services that I’m getting from Sprint. I did a pretty extensive spreadsheet which showed me that while AT&T and Verizon would cost me less in the long run, I’d have an up-front cost of about $1000 between early termination fees and buying new phones to switch from Sprint and one of their competitors. And I was honestly at the point of being tired of getting poor customer service from Sprint on the 6 lines thing, and also the mobile hotspot thing, that I was willing to pay that $1000 and move from Sprint to AT&T or Verizon. I called Sprint’s customer service and told them that I was unwilling to pay $70 for a 6th line and $19.99 for the privilege of having 2GB of mobile hotspot on one phone. I asked them if there was anything that they could do to work with me and convince me to stay with Sprint rather than canceling my 6 phone lines with them and my $350/month bill. And I received a resounding and final “nope, sorry, there’s nothing we can do for you.”

And so, today, I called Sprint customer service and told them that I wanted to cancel one of my phone lines. I spoke to an account representative who understood that I was not threatening to cancel. I was actually calling to cancel. And to my HUMONGOUS surprise, the account rep told me that she talked to her manager and they were able to just go ahead and put the 6th phone line on our main shared everything plan. This means that instead of having to have a separate plan for the 6th line and pay $70 per month for it alone, we would only have one phone plan and the 6th line would only cost us $19.99 extra per month.

Hallelujah! This is what I’ve been asking for for the last month!

But… wait a second…. Why didn’t Sprint do this to begin with? What is the difference between asking if there’s anything Sprint is willing to do to keep me as a customer, versus canceling a phone line?

It seems to my poor, uneducated-in-the-ways-of-mobile-phone-providers head that the difference is between making threats to cancel and actually canceling. Maybe in their minds, what I was doing before was trying to trick Sprint into giving me better customer service by threatening to leave them, and maybe they don’t respond to that or like it? But when I call to actually cancel a phone line with no questions first, then they’re able to actually give me good customer service so I don’t leave them?

Either way, it seems really petty and stupid to me. Maybe it makes sense to them because if people could just call and ask for good service and say that they’re thinking of leaving Sprint, they’d end up not making as much money because they wouldn’t be able to charge people as much per month? Maybe people would take advantage of Sprint and sign up all of their friends on their phone plan and that would be dishonest? Maybe there’s a rule book for Sprint customer service that says not to budge on things like this unless the customer is not merely threatening to cancel, but actually canceling?

I dunno… it’s just frustrating to be pushed to the wall and have to actually say “screw this; I’m outta here” to get what you feel like is fair and good customer service from a company. Maybe Sprint could sense fear or uncertainty when I called previously to say “hey, take me seriously, I’m really thinking of jumping ship”? Maybe they thought “ah, he’s just bluffing… he won’t really do it… we should stand firm and not give in?” Maybe the lady I spoke to previously didn’t actually care about giving good customer service and this lady did? Maybe when I called today, I had a manlier voice and it was clear that I wasn’t messing around?

Anyway, I don’t know what the rules and guidelines are for this game–either for the customer’s or Sprint’s side. I feel like I just discovered a secret way of getting good customer service… and I really don’t like it. I don’t want to have to start canceling service to get what I need. I’d like to just have good customer service provided to me because it’s the right thing to do and that’s how you should treat people. Say what you will about Apple, but I feel like they do a really good job at this and I think they deserve the customer loyalty that they’ve earned because of it.

End result: if the coming month’s bills reflect what was promised to me today, I’ll be staying with Sprint. Somewhere between grudgingly and happily, but staying nonetheless. For a family with 5 smart phones, Sprint honestly is the cheapest provider out there right now. And other than a few hiccups with my iPhone5 (which decided to get stuck in an infinite reboot loop last night and had to be DFU-restored to stop!?) and mobile hotspot reporting that I used 2GB worth of tethered data in 3 hours (is that even possible to do over a 3G data connection??), I’m otherwise very happy with Sprint. And today, I got good customer service from them, just as I have in the past.

I just hate that I had to go to DEFCON 1 to get it.

… or… man, I really don’t want to have to run CAT-6 wire from the basement to the second floor….

So I have a decently-big house. Thank you, God. 2 floors and a finished basement. I have a MacMini server in the second floor bedroom and it’s acting as the main audio/video server for the house. I want to have as fast a connection as possible between it and the AppleTV and GoogleTV in the main floor living room. I’ve already run CAT-6 from the main house router in the basement to the main living room. That was moderately unpainful as we have a drop ceiling in the basement. But there’s no easy way to get CAT-6 networking wire run from the basement to the second floor bedroom. I’d have to run wire almost the full length of the house to the conduit I installed last year that runs from the basement to the attic, and then back almost the full length of the house, drill a hole into the bedroom closet wall from the attic, run the wire down it, install a new CAT-6 wall jack, etc. Not the end of the world, but man I’d really like to not have to give up the 8+ hours or so it will take to do it right.

I do have a nice ASUS RT-N66U Dual-Band Wireless-N900 Gigabit Router (running DD-WRT) that serves up 802.11 B, G, and N to the house, and the Mac Mini Server is connected right now via 802.11N.

To try to avoid running CAT-6 wire, I figured I’d give the Netgear XAVB5101 Powerline Nano500 Set a try. Got it in from Amazon today (LOVE Amazon Prime!!), and set up a quick test to see how it performs compared to the 802.11 N WiFi connection I already have.

Let’s just say that I’m not horribly impressed just yet.

Now, I should state that the EOP (Ethernet over Power) connection/circuit in the basement is on the right side/pole of my house electrical breaker box and the connection/circuit in my bedroom is on the left side/pole. From what I’ve read, this won’t provide the best throughput and that it’s better to have both ends of the EOP connection be on the same side/pole. But as a first test, I did file copies over SSH of a 1.5G movie from my MacMini in the second floor bedroom to my MacBook Pro in the basement. I have a solid 1000Mbps connection from the MacBook pro in the basement to the house router. I did 5 iterations of this file copy over the 802.11N WiFi connection and then 5 iterations over the EOP LAN connection, which is advertised as being 500Mbps.

Here’s the results I saw over the EOP LAN connection:

# for f in $(seq 1 5); do scp user@MBP:Movies/THE_GREY.m4v THE_GREY-$f.m4v; done
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB   8.6MB/s   02:51
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  10.5MB/s   02:20
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  10.5MB/s   02:20
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  10.5MB/s   02:20
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  10.6MB/s   02:19

and here’s the results from going over 802.11 N:

# for f in $(seq 11 15); do scp user@MBP:Movies/THE_GREY.m4v THE_GREY-$f.m4v; done
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  16.2MB/s   01:31
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  16.0MB/s   01:32
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  16.7MB/s   01:28
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  16.7MB/s   01:28
THE_GREY.m4v                                  100% 1471MB  17.1MB/s   01:26

Wow. That’s pretty sad. Roughly 10.14 MB/s on average over EOP LAN and 16.54 MB/s on average over 802.11N. 802.11N, two floors away from the router in the basement, far out-performed the 500Mbps EOP LAN connection. =:( I may move the outlet circuit in the basement so that it’s on the same side/pole of the circuit breaker panel to see if that helps the EOP LAN connection, but at this point, I’m not sure I want to spend the time doing so.

Anyone out there travel down this road already? Is it worth it to move the circuit breaker around so that both connections are on the same side/pole? Will that let me get better-than-802.11N speed? Should I be satisfied with the 802.11N connection that seems to be working decently? Is ~ 16MB/s sufficient for 1080p streaming?

Or should I just give up, dedicate a day to the task, and run CAT-6 from the basement to the second floor bedroom?

I finally found the first watch band I’ve ever been excited about in my entire life and I just wanted to share it. It’s the Ballistic Nylon Strap (24mm, 5-Ring, Black). The reason this is so exciting for me is that when you attach your watch to it, you end up with a non-standard watch band where the buckle is actually near the side of your watch instead of on the bottom of your wrist. This means that if you’re a programmer like me, you won’t have a bulky watch band buckle digging into your wrist all day!

Now, first of all, this watch band is made from ballistic nylon, and while I don’t know exactly what that means, I’m pretty sure I can use it to deflect bullets like Wonder Woman. And when the description includes words like James Bond, NATO-style, military, police, and divers, that makes my inner geek stand up and take attention. Here’s the description from the website:

This strong, durable, nylon strap is called a Ballistic Nylon Watch Band. The black strap is designed to fit watches with 24mm lug widths. It is often worn by military, police, and divers. This one-piece strap “weaves” under your watch. If one spring bar breaks, you won’t lose your watch! One stainless-steel ring functions as the buckle, four others secure the watch in place, with two of them acting as keepers.
  • Black nylon strap
  • NATO-style, one-piece watch band for more secure attachment
  • Fits watches with lugs width of 24mm (see size info)
  • Adjustable length allows fit for many wrist sizes
  • Water resistant

Like I stated earlier, the fact that there is no watch band buckle on the bottom of your wrist means that instead of fighting with the watch band like every watch band I’ve ever had since the beginning of time (because resting your wrist on that buckle for 8+ hours a day ends up causing pain and anguish and such), you have just a single layer of ballistic nylon which causes zero interference or discomfort!

The only problem for me was that I didn’t have a watch face that would fit in this band, having previously purchased Diesel DZ7134 Watch (shown at the left). Like most digital watches out there these days, this Diesel uses a very tightly-integrated watch band and won’t work with the new James Bondy watchband I had my eye on. And while I loved the Diesel watch, I was really tired of constantly fighting with its watch band while resting my wrist on it as I worked.

But then I found a new watch that would work with the James Bondy watchband and looked every bit as cool as the Diesel: the Nixon Unit Watch (shown at the right). And it comes in blue! And it uses a more standard watch band that works beautifully with the James Bondy watchband I wanted to try! And seriously, I really do like it a lot. Even with the default watch band, it is probably my favorite watch ever.

But coupled with the ballistic nylon watch from The Watch Prince, it is the most awesome watch in the entire universe. So if you’re a James Bondy guy like me, or a hacker like me, or a fashionable dude like me, or a guy (or gal!) who’s tired of fighting with your watch band while trying to work, you might want to give this watch band (or something like it) a closer look.

After all, it’s what James Bond would do.

How many times have you heard something that starts with “it’s a funny thing when you start getting older” and then end up hearing things that make you cringe and silently vow to yourself that it’ll never happen to you. Yeah, me neither. But let’s imagine that we have.

If “it’s a funny thing when you start getting older”, it’s an even funnier thing when you get older and work from home 100% of the time. And if you think that’s funny, it’s an absolute riot when you get older, have a sit-down job, have a wife and 3 kids, work from home 100% of the time, and have no reason to go outside your front door more than once a week.

Unfortunately, as much as I have tried to deny, ignore, argue against, and shrug off these things, it’s not actually all that funny, and it’s high time I start doing something about it.

I had an awesome Dad growing up. He was my hero, truly. He was larger than life, powerful, strong, forceful, loving, gentle, kind, and caring. Oh, and he was a bodybuilder and worked out with the likes of Jack LaLanne, Lou Ferrigno, Arnold, and a bunch of other really awesome names that have long since faded into the sunset. But my Dad and I worked out together as I grew up and he taught me to take care of my body. And though I never took things to the level of bodybuilding competitions like he did, the years I spent with my Dad laid down a solid core to my physique that have lasted me my whole life since. So far at least.

And then I got married, and finding the time to work out regularly became pretty tough. And then we had kids and that time disappeared again. And then I got a job in IT where instead of walking around for 10+ hours a day constantly, I was now parking my butt in a chair for 8+ hours a day. And then I got an AWESOME job (my current job with VMware which I cannot even explain how much I love enough) where I get to work from home (stupid housing market crash *spit*) doing programming and such 100% of the time, from my chair in the basement.

And now I look in the mirror as I walk by and wonder who in the heck that chubby older dude is and why he’s in my bedroom, wearing my underwear and the Woot shirt I just picked out this morning.

It’s a funny thing when you get older and you find that you have to figure out how to take care of your body again.

So I’m taking a stand against these long stories that end badly and make people cringe and vow silently to themselves. I’ve been doing little bits and pieces of this incrementally through the last couple of years, but I’m getting more serious about it now. Especially since I’ve lost exactly zero pounds since the same date 1 year ago. I’ve also gained exactly zero pounds since the same date 1 year ago, but that’s little solace since the kindly-yet-roundly gentleman keeps showing up in my bedroom mirror.

I still need to actually sit down and write up an official “this is what I’m going to do every day” routine, but thus far, here’s what I have:

Every day, Monday – Friday, I’m planning on doing this stuff:

  1. Yoga for at least 20 minutes. I really enjoy Rodney Yee’s videos and I’ve been using A.M. Yoga for Your Week for a year+ now. It has a different 20-minute routine for every day of the week (M-F). I highly recommend it. I also think that maybe it’s time for me to grow beyond these rather beginner-level routines, so if anyone has advice on the next place to go here, I’d appreciate it.
  2. Running on the treadmill or biking for at least 20 minutes. Been doing this for a while now too and I’ve been catching up on Netflix videos while doing it and it’s pretty enjoyable and I get a good sweat going.
  3. Ab-Doer core and abdominal routines. My Dad had already bought me the Ab-Doer Professional workout equipment years ago (it was the earlier version of the Ab-Doer Twist Abdominal Trainer), and while it may look kind of goofy, I do believe that it offers a really good full-midsection workout. So I’m going to try working my way through the videos John Abdo did again and see if I can stick to it and see some progress. Sadly, I lost the original VHS tapes that I had for my Ab-Doer Pro and had to re-order them from Mr. Abdo. These videos are 10 – 20 minutes long as you work your way up.

So there’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I think that if I can be consistent with this and actually do it well for a year or so, I should be in a much better physical condition. Really, I’d just like to stop seeing that portly dude who keeps stealing my underwear and Woot shirts.

A Tale Of Two Tablets

December 30, 2011    Category: Life in General   2 Comments »

I’ve been meaning to blog about the two tablets I’ve been playing with for the last year+ for quite a while, and just never found the time or motivation. Let me say up front that I’m not writing this with the intention of swaying anyone’s opinions or influencing anyone’s purchase. I’ve been mulling the goods and bads about these two tablets around in my head for a long time and I just want to put them down somewhere so I can keep track of them.

My first and main tablet is my iPad (first generation) with 32 GB of memory and built-in GPS/3G networking. I bought it on May 11, 2010. At the time, we were just about to head across the country on a family driving-across-America vacation for two weeks. While I was definitely enamored with the iPad, I was trying to justify its $729 price tag by loading it up with movies and then having the kids watch the iPad as we trekked across the lower 48. While we did do this a few times during the trip, my shiny new iPad didn’t really serve this purpose as I had originally imagined and for the most part, the kids just did their own thing while we were driving. But it is smooth and stable and functional and does just about everything I could want in a tablet.

The second tablet I have is the Nook Color. I bought two of these off eBay on February 28, 2011 when they were $199 a piece. At the time, my wifey was asking for a tablet to play with and I’d been following the news of the Android hackers who had gotten a whole lot more functionality out of the Nook Color than it had been intended to provide. My wifey still uses her hacked Nook Color every day now, running CyanogenMod 7.0.3 Stable. I chose to keep tinkering with mine, however, so I’ve been running the CM7 nightlies for a while and now have CM 7.1.0 Stable installed. To be fair, I think I’ve pushed my Nook Color well past what it was designed for, so I think that quite a bit of the frustrations and complaints I have with my Nook Color are due to the inherently unstable hackery therein and are not indicative of Android tablets as a larger group, or even of the experience one would have running the stock software on their Nook Color.

But I think I’m through with trying to keep tweaking my Nook Color. $199 was a pretty inexpensive price to pay for a 7″ Android tablet, especially at the beginning of this year when there weren’t nearly as many options for Android tablets in the market. But I think I’ve reached the limits on how functional and stable and optimized and fun I can make it and am now tired of banging my head against this wall that won’t budge. So I wanted to list out some things about both tablets that are both good and bad below, and I’ll probably keep adding to them as I think of them over the next couple of months.

iPad – Pro’s

  1. The little dude is really, really stable. Even though iOS 5 seems to have some twitchiness that Apple hasn’t quite ironed out fully yet, my iPad1 almost never gives me problems with stability. Apps may crash every once in a while, and this probably has as much to do with iOS 5 as anything else, but the overall device stability is fantastic. Apple did a great job of protecting the core OS from app instability and I think I’ve only had to reboot my iPad a handful of times in the year and a half that I’ve owned it.
  2. Battery life is really good. It got worse with iOS 5, but it still lasts me a few days between charges with quite a bit of use throughout the day.
  3. Having an on-device GPS is really nice. While I typically been using my HTC EVO 4G as my GPS device and mapping solution when I drive, the big iPad screen + GPS Drive HD makes for a really nice GPS/turn-by-turn-map solution.
  4. Video playback is superb. My darling bride and I typically end our days together in bed, watching Snooker or some TV on my iPad, hooked up via Bluetooth to my Jawbone Jambox. Aside from some obnoxious video buffering problems that pop up every once in a while, the iPad1 plays back videos of all kinds (especially with the VLC iOS app) flawlessly.
  5. Bluetooth works flawlessly. This I especially appreciate because the Nook Color has a Bluetooth range of (no, seriously) about 10 inches. My iPad1’s Bluetooth stack is extremely stable and I can easily sit my Jambox down in one room for my wife to listen to and take my iPad with me into another room and still have a flawless music connection going over Bluetooth. Using my external Bluetooth keyboard with my iPad is quite enjoyable and accurate.

iPad – Con’s

  1. It’s not very customizable. In the customize versus stability trade-off department, this is understandable, but still kind of irritating. I love to tinker with my devices, so this bothers me every once in a while. And it’s sad, really, but I get bored sometimes with an otherwise perfectly working and stable device. I wish I could change UI themes and such on my iPad.
  2. Well, sort of in the customizable department, but I really wish you could change the keyboard on iOS devices in general and the iPad in particular.
  3. Hm, also in the customization department, but I really wish Apple would let you access things like music controls from the lock screen of the iPad. Android does a really nice job on this.

Nook Color – Pro’s

  1. I kind of like the 7-inch form factor. It’s different, at least. And you can conceivably throw it in a purse (which my wife does) and take it more places than you can a 10″ tablet like the iPad. Also, the little corner loop thing is cool, as are the lanyards you can easily put on it. It is definitely smaller in my SackPack than my iPad is.
  2. Extremely easy to customize and root and it’s just about brick-proof. If you’re looking for a toy to hack and play with, this is a really nice one. Of course, the flip-side of this coin is stability, so YMMV (mine certainly did).
  3. Customizable on-screen keyboards are really cool! I love SwiftKey on my Nook Color and Android phone. It is SO nice and I really wish iOS let you change keyboards.
Nook Color – Con’s
  1. I don’t think I like the 7-inch form factor. I know, this contradicts what I said above, but the difference in screen-render-and-view size as well as room-to-interact size between 7″ and 10″ tablets is pretty significant. I don’t think I’d want anything smaller than 10″ for a tablet I’m going to use every day.
  2. Not very stable. At least, I’ve given up trying to get the CM 7.1.0 Stable ROM to be stable and reliable on my Nook Color. I know, this is more a statement of the stability of the CM 7.1.0 Stable ROM than it is of my Nook Color, and I could probably have a stable device if I just ran the CM 7.0.3 Stable ROM like my wife does, but that bothers me. If it’s a customizable toy then I want to run the latest and greatest on it, and that doesn’t work for me. From the widely-known Sleep Of Death problems to app crashes to bad battery statistics/voltages, etc., stability on my Nook Color is nothing like the stability of the iPad.
  3. Bluetooth is a joke. This, again, is because the Nook Color wasn’t even supposed to have Bluetooth at all. The Nook Color hackers found a way to get Bluetooth working, but the range is limited to 10 inches (no, seriously, 10 inches!), so it’s all but useless.
  4. Screen responsiveness and precision is bad, compared to the iPad. Now, this, I think, is maybe more true to all 7-inch tablets? Or at least, I would think that the precision required to click on things on 7-inch tablet is much higher than that on a 10-inch tablet. At any rate, I am constantly finding myself clicking on something other than what I intended to click on on my Nook Color, and only rarely find that happening on my iPad.
  5. No built-in GPS. While TetherGPS lets you use the GPS from your Android phone on your Nook Color, it’s not nearly as nice as having GPS built in on the Nook Color.
  6. The CPU seems to just not be able to keep up. Even overclocked at 1.2Ghz, my Nook Color hits 100% CPU usage an awful lot and it freezes the entire tablet very often, which makes for a pretty unreliable experience.
  7. Battery usage is really bad, especially in the CM 7.1.0 release. I think it was much better in the 7.0.3 release that my wifey is running, but I can’t let the little guy go for more than a day and a half, it seems, before he’s dead.
  8. External keyboard support is really bad. I’m not sure how much of this should be chalked up to the horrible Bluetooth support on the Nook Color, versus problems with the keyboard software on the NC reacting badly to the external keyboard input, but using an external keyboard has never worked out well for me on my Nook Color. I’ve even had the Android keyboard software force close on me a few times while I was using my external bluetooth keyboard.

I guess that’s all I’ve got for now. Again, I’m not trying to sell you anything or sway your mind at all. I just wanted to jot down the experience I’ve had with both of these tablets and keep a running list somewhere to remind myself why I’m using what I’m using now. =:)

And finally, yes, I’m aware that it’s not entirely fair to call the Nook Color an Android Tablet. It was never intended to be one, and it was meant primarily as an eReader with limited other applications. But it’s all I have to go on for a comparison.

I think that from the experience I’ve had with these two tablets, I truly would like to try a new, full-featured Android tablet that has built-in GPS, Bluetooth, and a 10-inch screen. My concern is that rooting said tablet and tweaking the UI too much or installing custom ROMs, etc., is going to end up in the same instability that I have with the Nook Color, and that would make me über sad. But maybe not? I’ve been told the Xoom is the most dev-friendly and kept-up-to-date Android tablet right now. Any suggestions?

Dear Lazyweb,

I need to buy a laptop for personal use. I’ve been using Thinkpads as work laptops for so long that I think I’d like to try something else out for a change. It needs to be Dual Core/Core 2 Duo/whatever. Would be nice if it had a fast 200+GB drive in it. And it absolutely MUST have a fast, awesome graphics card in it that has zero problems with compositing, Linux, KDE4, suspend/resume, or anything else. Having dealt with nVidia cards for quite a while now, I’m guessing this means that the new laptop shouldn’t have an nVidia graphics card in it. I am so tired of the constant problems I have with KDE4 and the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M I have on my work Thinkpad T61–can’t use compositing for more than a day before the system becomes totally unstable and invariably X crashes, etc. =:( Maybe an Intel or ATI card? Also, it would be really groovy if the battery lasted longer than 3 hours, consistently.

Anyone have any suggestions? What have people had good success with in a laptop, been able to do compositing and full desktop effects in KDE4 without having any problems or system instability, etc., etc.? I was thinking of maybe trying a new MacBook, but having tried that before and absolutely hated the keyboard (wth, Steve, no home/end/page-up/page-down keys???), I’m not sure how long I’d last on it before pounding my forehead into it. And that’s about where my list of ideas ends. Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

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